by Phil Rickman
‘Two way mirrors,’ he’s saying. ‘That’s what they always do on Big Brother, isn’t it? There’s a narrow walkway behind, where cameramen creep like perverts. I hate that side of it.’
‘No worse than CCTV in a shopping centre,’ Helen says. ‘We’re all under surveillance now, soon as we leave home.’
Ozzy’s screwing up his eyes.
‘Maybe, if you’re at the right angle, you can see through a two-way mirror. See who’s on the other side. Would that explain it?’
‘Wouldn’t know. I’ve never worked with secret filming.’
‘Or maybe,’ Ozzy says, ‘I just fell asleep looking into the mirror. Didn’t get much sleep last night. Maybe I drifted off. I don’t know. And then drifted back. In and out of it. Sleep and wakefulness intersecting. You know what I mean? Gets confusing.’
Grayle and Jo exchanging glances. What’s he saying? Helen’s interested, too.
‘How false memories are made. Ozzy, what did you see in those seconds? Out of interest, what did you actually see? I’m not trying to trap you or anything. Not trying to prove you saw a ghost or that you’re actually psychic, which would be pointless, but…’
Ozzy smiles at her.
‘Don’t like it when you lose the plot, do you, Helen?’
‘Hate it. Takes me back to when I was a young reporter on a big story and all the national papers would be there, and they all knew each other, and you felt they all knew what the story was and you didn’t. Don’t expect you to understand that. It’s just nerves playing tricks.’
Ozzy turns his chair to her.
‘I thought I saw a woman. In the mirror.’
‘The same woman you saw last night, in your room?’
‘Dunno. Maybe. But that wasn’t much more than a scent.’
‘Yes, I know, but…’
‘This was a woman in white. Looked at first like a robe, but I think it was a coat. A long, white mac… trench coat kind of thing.’
‘What kind of woman? How old?’
‘Couldn’t make out her face. But young, I think. I thought she was real at first, maybe one of the technicians. Definitely looked more real than that bloody troll with the logs last night.’
‘So, as you don’t believe in the paranormal…’
‘I don’t believe in Jesus.’ Ozzy looks down the front of his hoodie. ‘I don’t believe anyone gets saved. Yeah, I went for a closer look.’
‘You ran at her.’
‘Before she could get away. I’m like, What’s up? What do you want? She didn’t say anything but she slowly opened her coat, and she… she was naked underneath? Yeah, I know, I know… Thing is… it didn’t matter, her being naked. What mattered was that she was covered with what looked like bruises, and she was bleeding, and it was like that was what she wanted me to see, what she wanted me to know. That she’d been hurt.’
‘I see.’
‘You don’t.’
‘Erm… I hate myself for asking this, but…’
‘Not Diana, Helen. I know we’d all been listening to you, and you told it very vividly, but no, not Diana.’
‘You cried.’
‘Did I? Shit. Maybe because I’d realized she wasn’t there. That she was just in my mind. Felt the hurt coming off a woman who didn’t exist and it just broke me up. That’s what tiredness does. And brain chemicals. I’m a mess, Helen.’
The wide shot shows several people in that chamber pretending disinterest whilst clearly straining to hear what’s coming crisply through to the gallery from those personal mics.
Jo says, ‘This is almost too much for one night, don’t you think?’
Grayle leans back.
‘Helen did my job for me. No wonder he didn’t want to go into the chapel. I guess you want me to find out if Trinity Ansell ever wore a white trench coat.’
‘Leo will.’
‘I’ll do what I can.’
‘You check your phone?’
Jo glances at Grayle’s bag where the mobile sleeps.
‘Right. I got the message.’
Neither of them has mentioned the text. Everything’s accelerating before their eyes, and it may not be making the kind of sense that Defford wants. Or any at all.
The clock says there’s less than eight minutes to the first transmission.
50
Surfeit of detail
THE ESTABLISHING SHOT. Is that what it’s called? Looks like a still until you notice the off-white light in a window is not static. A shivery light. The gables are flat silhouettes against a cold night sky. Even an architectural historian would not recognize the house from this.
‘This is a haunted house.’ Matthew Barnes’s soft voice spelling it out for the millions. ‘And whatever that means, we want to know. Really know.’
The front door swinging open to yellowy, smeary light. No music, nothing naff. Grayle feels a small seismic shudder: God, it’s happening, programme one going out to the millions, and although it’s not live, it is live, the house entering the ether.
A woman in the passage: Eloise, her back to the camera. Another camera picking her up from the stone hallway on the other side, top of the steps. She has the right face for this, expressing an acceptance that anything could happen tonight.
And it will. When the viewer watches her discovery in the fire in the ingle, it won’t disappoint. You see the anomaly through her eyes. It will set that tone of very real instability.
Reality TV is deceptive. Only editing allows that passage to access this hallway. But, hell, it looks good.
Cut to clouds scudding across the moon. Normally the sky might be speeded up, but the elements were playing ball when this was shot, just last night, the clouds really shifting.
In the house, more lights come on, room after room but only in that one corner of the building. The dirty lantern.
Grayle slips away.
*
In the chapel, one bulb burns in a small safety lamp set into a recess like an aumbry – where the communion chalice normally lives.
Grayle’s never been here at night before. It feels, more than ever, like a sanctuary. More of one than anywhere in the actual house.
He’s waiting in the corner of a pew, hands primly on his skirted knees.
‘Gone to the toilet, I have, little Grayle. Never easy to get away. Someone always notices if you’re gone. The toilet’s all we have. Pull down the wooden lid, we do, and sit there and relish the silence. Come to this, it has.’
Above him, facing the screened window with the camera behind, is the inquisition chair, empty as a dead king’s throne. Grayle sags gratefully into the pew opposite Cindy.
‘Is it as bad in there as it looks?’
‘It looks bad?’
‘Getting weird, Cindy. These are not airheads.’
‘Two days to become institutionalized. That’s what they say, isn’t it?’
‘Yeah. Something like that. Listen… What did Ozzy see?’
‘Now that,’ Cindy says, ‘is interesting. He does indeed give every indication of fighting against himself.’
‘So you think Eloise could be right. He’s in denial?’
‘Not cool to be psychic, is it? Not what a cynical stand-up comedian needs in his life.’
‘So does that’ – Grayle leaning forward – ‘does that explain his anti-religion gags, his witchy mother-in-law routines? I talked to his mother-in-law. Seemed, in spite of all he said about her, to have a respect for him. Said he was clever. But what happened in there… that didn’t look at all clever to me. Looked like something was taking him apart.’
‘Indeed. What’s Mr Defford’s view of it?’
‘When I was in there, he hadn’t seen it. He’s watching his first show go out. But it’s obvious who he’ll think the woman was. Or who he’ll think the woman needs to be for our purposes.’
‘Trinity.’
‘You know if she ever wore a white coat? Raincoat, trench coat?’
‘I don’t know. I remember a da
rk cloak, that’s all. Keeping a low profile, I am, for now, little Grayle. A haunted house – what is it? An imbalance, perhaps. Might be no more than atmospherics caused by something physical like a crossing of natural watercourses underneath. Might be something… less natural.’ Cindy frowns. ‘Trinity’s a victim.’
‘She’s still around?’
Sometimes Grayle can’t believe she can still talk like this. She looks across at Cindy in his mauve and pink woollens, Cindy who can make you believe anything. Even in the dimness, his features are soft and kindly – not effeminate, but not what you’d call uniformly masculine either. Monkish, perhaps, although when he smiles it’s the smile of a tarnished monk who knows that an abbey is the very last place he should be.
For once, he doesn’t answer.
‘You don’t have strong feelings?’
He crosses his legs, in pink tights under the skirt.
‘I’m rushing into nothing. Ever since Trinity died, I’ve felt inadequate, as you know. I didn’t see. Now I find myself withdrawing into a corner. Useless, as Marcus often says, for any of us to pretend we know what we’re doing.’
‘Least of all HGTV.’
He laughs.
‘Tension, friction, the combustion of negative emotions. What fun.’
Silence. Here in the chapel, in the sanctuary, she believes. And she’s afraid for them, these overpaid losers.
‘But the reason for this,’ Cindy says, ‘the reason I’ve had to employ all this subterfuge… I do need your help. Need you to visit someone for me.’
‘Well…’ She’s wary. ‘If it’s not too far, it might be possible. They’d apply manacles if they could. That is, we can get out, but they like to know where we’re going.’
‘Leave early, my advice. Before they’re up. They’ve taken our phones, see.’
‘I know.’
‘Mrs Lyons goes through all our messages to see if there’s anything urgent. Missing nothing that smells of betrayal.’
‘I realize that.’
‘So when she found a particular text, marked urgent, from a certain Mrs Emma Moore, I was called in here to see if it was life-or-death important. Naturally, I said not. Said Emma Moore was just a long-time fan who pestered me. Of no consequence.’
‘But in fact…?’
‘She’s the daughter of Trinity’s housekeeper, Poppy Stringer. Whose name would be recognized at once, throwing suspicion on both of us.’
‘So Stringer knows you’re here?’
‘I told her. I went to see her a few days ago. Poppy’s a strange woman, see. Loyalty’s important to her. More important than anything. Her husband was disloyal in some minor way and almost immediately became history. And it seemed to me there were some things she hadn’t told me because of Harry Ansell. Because he’d been her employer. It occurred to me that now Harry Ansell was dead…’
Didn’t push her, just left his phone number, and she gave him the name of her daughter who he’s never met. Mrs Stringer, he reminds Grayle, is a very old-fashioned person, discretion her watchword and therefore closer to the Ansells than any of their other former employees. Defford would have liked her to lead his catering team, but she wouldn’t come back. If he was paying her, she’d feel under pressure to answer questions about her former employers, the Ansells.
‘Wouldn’t talk to me, Cindy, that’s for sure.’
‘Well, exactly. I’m… grateful to young Jo for arranging this meeting. And I think I’m taking too long in the toilet. Even for an upset stomach.’ He stands up. ‘Evidently, Poppy has something to tell me. You’ll have her phone number?’
‘But she wouldn’t talk to me.’
‘She will now, I think,’ Cindy says.
The gate to the walled garden has been left unlocked and she gets out onto the footpath at the foot of the pine-topped hill. Moving quickly; it’s started to rain and she has no coat.
No flashlight either, other than the tiny one on her cellphone, useful for lighting up a key in a lock and not much else. The half-moon which guided her here has been swallowed by cloud. Knap Hall rears behind the wall, to her right.
Right? That’s wrong. In her hurry, she turned the wrong way. Shit.
Just one light visible, far back in the house, glad when, at the end of the building, the path broadens and a sliver of escaping moon lights a gathering of eerie little growths like dwarf monoliths.
The knot garden, with the open-fronted barn on the other side of it. Just need to get around the garden and she can start to run through the hardening rain.
Then the cellphone’s shrilling in her jeans. Damn. She pulls it, shielding it with an arm. The screen says: Marcus. She picks up the call.
‘Just gimme a minute, Marcus.’
Walks around the knot garden and takes him out of the rain, into the barn. It’s now packed to the entrance with straw, old bales stacked up forming interior walls. She switches on the little flashlight in the phone, looking for a place to squeeze in; it’s LED and better than she figured, showing the barn to be older and higher than she thought from outside. Oak trusses which, presumably, once supported a hayloft, long gone.
She enters a narrow alley between the stacks of small bales, some probably brought in from the stable block when it was cleared.
‘Marcus?’
‘You able to talk, Underhill? Thought you’d be watching your programme.’
‘Long story.’
‘Commercial break. The woman playing hell about elder wood on the fire. That a set-up?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Anyway, made me think I ought to leave a message for you, get you to call me tomorrow. Didn’t expect an answer. Where are you?’
‘I’m, uh, in a barn? Sheltering from the rain.’
Smell of must, air full of dust. Very dry but, hell, it’s cold. She slips into a space between straw-towers. The floor feels harder underfoot.
Marcus tells her he’s spent most of the day reading old farm documents. Found an expert who emailed him scans of documents going back to the late 1700s, showing evidence of transactions between A. Fishe and John Lucas, both tenant farmers.
‘Transactions?’
‘Stock. Sheep, mainly. Just needed proof they knew one another. Unlikely they didn’t, their farms being so close.’
‘This is significant?’
‘Lucas was the farmer renting the land around Sudeley Castle from the then owner, Lord Rivers. Lucas was the man who discovered, in a shallow grave, the remains of Katherine Parr, in a coffin like a lead body-bag. And exposed the body. In a remarkable state of preservation.’
‘Like a saint. Allegedly.’
‘The word “moist” is used.’
‘Maybe too much information, Marcus.’
‘A surfeit of detail indicates it’s not mythology. I’ve emailed you some of the letters from Lucas to Lord Rivers, and also the reports of various antiquarians. Doesn’t make edifying reading, Underhill, but I think you need to.’
He tells her how proud Lucas seems to have been of his discovery. How many people he showed it to over the period of KP’s final decay. He tells her about – Jesus – the reports of molestation. He’s thinking of what might have happened when the body was newly discovered, her face and body good as—
‘Marcus, I’m not a queasy person, but…’
Oh hell, something’s fallen to the ground with the familiar, always slightly upsetting, sound of breaking glass.
Marcus didn’t hear, goes on talking.
‘The word “antiquarian” was a general cover-up for various busybodies and opportunists. One, as you’ll see, claims he was one of the first to learn of the discovery of Parr’s body. Rushed to the castle, to find it was gone. Nobody about to ask. When he returned a week later, it was back and he was told it had never been moved. Where did it go?’
‘What are you saying? They thought she was in such good condition after two hundred years that she could, like walk? Marcus, look… could you just hold on a minute, I th
ink I broke something.’
She lowers the phone, switches on the LED flashlight.
On the flagged floor – a floor swept clean – a framed photo lies, its glass smashed. She bends to it, with the lamp, sees a face in a faded colour photograph. She shakes away fragments of glass, uncovering a youngish woman, dark hair pulled back into a white ribbon.
Where did this come from? As she stands up, holding the picture, postcard-size, by its frame, the light finds an alcove in the straw walls, four bales arranged into a square base, a blue cloth over it.
Blue with gold edges. Like an altar cloth.
Grayle throws the little light around, illuminates a small silver dish. A leather-bound pocket Bible. A prayer book.
Another tier of bales rises behind the cloth, and there’s a foot-high wooden cross pushed into the straw.
What…?
Grayle switches off the light, brings the phone to her ear.
‘Marcus?’
‘Something wrong?’
‘Marcus, I just walked into this barn, and it’s full of piled-up straw bales and in the centre… I just found an altar? A Christian altar?’
‘In a barn?’
‘Not even used as a barn any more, just a store. No reason for anybody to come in here, apart from shelter, and even then…’
‘Old?’
‘Barn’s old. The altar, not at all. No dust. And there’s a picture of a woman in a frame? I don’t know who she is. It’s like a goddamn shrine. Somebody swept the floor.’
‘No one knows about it?’
‘No one told me about it.’
‘You know what, Underhill, I’d get out of there. Check it out tomorrow. In daylight. With someone else. Then call me.’
‘Right. OK. I think I will.’
She feels tight inside. Shrivelled up against the cold. She starts thinking of what might be under all the straw. She thinks of a two-centuries-old moist woman.
Too much information.
51
Not to be understood
A WOMAN IN a black parka is standing at the bottom of the lane, close to the hedge, hooded against the wind-driven rain. Grayle slows the Mini, brings down her window, identifies herself.